The essential strategy every firm needs to roll out advisory services

Essentially, advisory services help your clients to understand where they should and can be financially. They have (as you very well know) been slogging away on Excel spreadsheets, manually plugging in each piece of data only to find that once they’ve finished it, it’s out of date.

Business owners are desperate to see the direction their company is taking and understand why – and they might not even know they need to know yet. Having the knowledge that what they do today will affect their tomorrow, the end result will be them hitting their goals, and you being their hero. We understand that having a superhero cape would be amazing, but the end goal for your firm isn’t a change in daily attire, rather increased revenue and a great reputation.

Advisory should be your goal

You may be reading this and thinking, ‘but things are fine, why should I bother transitioning to advisory?’ But why would you be happy with ‘fine’? I’m sure your clients are striving for more, so why wouldn’t you? Not only will your team likely be more engaged as they’re taking on a role of more responsibility and interesting work, but as it’s a higher ticketed item, so to speak, you can increase your prices to match.

How are you going to make sure you are maximising your revenue? You’re going to conduct a business health check for your clients. To business owners, this sounds amazing. And it really is – it’ll take you no longer than five minutes to set up, and gets most clients to sign up for advisory services. Less time spent on each client, higher prices and happy clients. Let’s get started so you can implement this across the whole of your firm.

Win over your clients from scratch with a business health check

Talk to your clients! We cannot stress the importance of this enough. Find out about their ambitions, their drive, where they want to be in five or even ten years. The more information you have about where they want to be, the better equipped you are to handle their data. In the first instance, start with your Xero and Quickbooks clients – Futrli will suck the data from the beginning of time from their cloud accounts and you’re ready to start the health check.

Make sure you lead your client meeting with the focus on the next 12 months and get to know their plans. They’ll be able to see their cashflow, which in turn will show them the value of your service. You can flag any low cashflow months and suggest solutions in this meeting, which will reaffirm your clients’ trust and confidence in you. Set up alerts for every KPI that needs it (for example if their cash goes below £500) – this is your prompt outside of your monthly meetings and using this tool, you can honestly tell clients you’ll monitor their business until your next meeting.

One of my clients came onto our Bronze partner package with 20 licences and had done nothing. He went through the training and offered it out to his clients, but nothing really happened. After a catch up and some training, I suggested he tried again to get advisory MMRs in the bag – he had 15 out of 20 opt in after conducting their business health checks!

– Helen Cockle, COO Futrli

And if that’s not enough, we can also help with…

White Labelling. Make Futrli your own by uploading your own branding and login page. Perfect for advisory, give your clients the full experience of your firm.

Benchmarking. Evaluate your clients’ business against their industry standard. They’ll get a great understanding of where they are against their competitors.

Training. If you feel unsure as to how to conduct a health check or shifting to advisory, get in touch. We have Management Accountants on hand who will coach you through it all.

Marketing training. Completed all of the above and want to shout about it? We’ll take you through SEO, social media and email campaigns to really get your voice heard.